If you haven't seen it before more, the final version - 6.3 - of one of the most massive game re-works in some time has been released.

Fans of Deus Ex should definitely check out the GMDX mod. AI improvements, gameplay improvements, and a whole heck of a lot of bugfixes as well as changes based on what the developers might have done if they'd had the chance to fix some of the exploits or bugs found over the years.

Not that the original isn't awesome. It says something about a game when the fans love it enough to fix it up like this years later!

And as of this week, it now also includes arcade games. Yet another branch of the ever-expanding Internet Archive, the new Internet Arcade brings over 900 classic arcade cabinets to your browser.

Like the Console Living Room, the Internet Arcade is an effort to archive and present these games through JSMESS, a project to emulate various computer systems through JavaScript. The benefit? The games can run right in your browser and thus don't require any third-party software (like a standalone MAME emulator).

Bungie left Microsoft, and left the Halo franchise in Microsoft's hands. They decided to take their existing strengths (developed in the Marathon and Halo days) and make an online-based semi-MMO shooter called Destiny. Basically one part Marathon, one part Halo, with a little Borderlands thrown in.

Only problem: the "always on" requirements are proving tough to sell. There were actually less problems in the free open beta than there are currently trying to play online; disconnects from server are frequent and cause players to lose progress in missions, drop from teams, and generally have a bad time even while their internet connections and Xbox Live / PSN connections, team groups, and voice chat are all rock solid.

In some ways, this illustrates the problem of the "always on" model and why the Borderlands model is probably superior. Your "always on" is subject to the troubles both of server-side processing and connection issues, while a Borderlands model requires much less power to operate and isn't nearly as consumed by the single point of failure issues. As a bonus, I can play Borderlands even when the cable lines are temporarily down; the same can't be said for Destiny.

Let's just say MS's attempt to recruit friends and neighbors to get people to migrate from WinXP didn't go as planned...

In early February, faced with a slight uptick in users on the decrepit operating system the month before, Microsoft hit on an idea: Why not recruit tech-savvy friends and family to tell old holdouts to get off XP?

The response to this earnest effort was a torrent of abuse from Windows 8 users who aren't exactly thrilled with the operating system. Microsoft has come under serious fire for some significant missteps in this process, including a total lack of actual upgrade options. What Microsoft calls an upgrade involves completely wiping the PC and reinstalling a fresh OS copy on it -- or ideally, buying a new device.

So before we move on to the nuances of the argument, let’s get one thing out of the way: Expressing a desire for a game to enter the public domain, let’s say twenty years after publication, does not in any sense whatsoever suggest a desire for developers to not get paid. I resent having to type this. It’s a bit like finding yourself having to say that you’re not in favour of gruesomely starving children to death because you expressed a thought that they probably shouldn’t get to exclusively eat at McDonald’s. What I am in fact saying is: “developers should get paid for the work they do, and then keep getting paid for the same bit of work, over and over and over for the next twenty years, even though they stopped doing any work related to it many years ago.” It’s not entirely apparent how the two sentiments are being confused.

Well, it is, actually – I’m being facetious. The two are being deliberately conflated by a contingent who find the possibility of cultural artifacts ever returning to the culture that spawned them to be so repellent that they must eliminate anything that treads even close to challenging what they see as their perpetual rights to profit from ancient work. (And let’s be clear here – creators are arguing for perpetual copyright here, far outreaching even the current grasp of the law.)